Free The Evolution of Jane by Cathleen Schine

corporate lawyer. By night, she raised hermit crabs.
    "What do they taste like?"
    "As
pets
," she said.
    I said her name silently, as I did everyone's in an attempt to keep them all straight. Cindy. Then I thought of Noah's wife. When I was very little, three years old maybe, and screaming angrily from the bathtub, my grandmother came in to appease me, as grandmothers do. She sat on the toilet with the lid down and told me the story of Noah's ark. She mentioned Noah and his sons Shem, Ham, and Japheth, and Noah's wife.
    "What was Noah's wife's name?" I asked my grandmother.
    "Cindy," she said.
    In fact, Noah's wife has no name, does she? But my grandmother didn't miss a beat: "Cindy." For years I thought Noah's wife's name was Cindy.
    I told our Cindy this story. It seemed particularly appropriate on a boat traveling through the very islands that helped Darwin set the flood story on its ear. People ought to have suspected something was off about that ark business right from the get-go, right at the part where it introduced Noah's wife and didn't mention that her name was Cindy.
    "Cindy?" Cindy said. "Not even Cynthia?"
    "Jane and I come from a very informal family," Martha said.
    It was her first mention that we were not just old friends but relatives, too. Cindy pricked up her ears immediately. Others, too, seemed to have heard and were leaning our way.
    "You're related?" asked Jeannie from across the room.
    "Distant cousins," Martha said.
    The Cornwalls, as the official family on board, looked displeased.
    "Wow," said Ethel, which seemed to be the general consensus.
    Wow, indeed.

    On deck that night, I looked at the sky and tried to remember everything I had seen on our first field trip. The air was cool and I had to wear a sweatshirt. I saw the Southern Cross. The Big Dipper was in the wrong place.
    I had already climbed into my bunk and turned out my light when Gloria returned to the cabin. I lay in the roar of the engine and the roll of the sea and watched as she stood in the doorway looking at Jupiter's moon through her binoculars. She was carrying a PBS tote bag with an umbrella poking out of it.
    Yes, it was good that my husband left me so that my mother could send me on this trip, I thought. There is flora here, and there is fauna. There is Gloria. Martha is here, and she will come around. She will show herself to me eventually—she will rise like the Southern Cross, revolve into sight like Jupiter's moon. This is paradise, this boat and its creatures, all of us engaged in the clear and simple routine of following the leader.
    "But why are you carrying an umbrella, Gloria?" I said to the large silhouette in the doorway.
    She smiled, patted the long, rolled umbrella affectionately.
    "Just in case," she said.

5
    T HE FEUD BETWEEN Martha's family and my own was a mystery to me as a child, but in that respect it did not differ from most of my experiences in those days. So much of that time has a hazy quality to it. I don't think that's simply a trick of memory, or a failure, like a failure of eyesight, a mnemonic myopia that blurred what was really perfectly clear. I think the blur is accurate.
    My brothers towered above me, exchanging glances and smiles I could not interpret. My mother and father lived in an Olympus of subtleties and nuance. I watched them and I wondered. I wondered about a lot of things.
    "If you were a tiny man, as big as a thumb," I said to my father, "and you stood inside my mouth, and I closed my mouth, would you suffocate and die?"
    My father stared at me.
    "Jane," he said, "I'm speechless."
    "'I'm speechless' is speech," I said, somewhat mollified by this linguistic triumph.
    I resented that state of childhood wonder. It was insatiable, yet it seemed to me to be no more than a puerile affliction, like baby teeth. My ignorance struck me as a bizarre anomaly, for I felt, with utter certainty, that I was—how can I say this?—that I was
sufficient.
Evidence to the contrary forced itself on me